Tulsa Standard

The University of Tulsa volleyball student-athlete Kayley Cassaday has not only excelled on the court, but her prowess has continued in the classroom as well. This past season, the senior earned first-team all-league accolades in the American Athletic Conference for the second straight season and was also honored with second-team Academic All-America honors by the College Sports Communicators (CSC).
 
Cassaday, a mechanical engineering student, along with her groupmates, have been tasked with completing a senior design project over the course of the academic year. She and her group chose to participate in the NASA Micro-G NExT Challenge. 

The challenge invites students from across the country to address and find real-world solutions for current issues in space travel and exploration. Test operations are conducted in a simulated microgravity environment at NASA's Johnson Space Center Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston, Texas.
 
"Every year NASA puts out multiple engineering problems that they've experienced on their missions or in the field," said Cassaday. "NASA encourages college students across the nation to come up with innovative solutions to these problems."
 
"The problem we selected as our design project is an attachment mechanism for an extension handle and a tool attachment head. During Apollo moon missions, their previous design would get clogged up with moon dust, which is different than earth dust. So, they encouraged us to figure out a solution that is dust tolerant specifically."
   
Cassaday, from Overland Park, Kan., has maintained a 4.0 grade point average in her four years at Tulsa and will graduate in May.
 
On the court, the 5'11" outside hitter led the Golden Hurricane volleyball team in the 2022 season with 525 kills and added 251 digs and 35 total blocks. Cassaday moved into fourth place on the school's all-time kills chart with 1,281 kills in her career.
 
Cassaday's groupmates on the NASA project include: Kirsten Erickson (Overland Park, Kan.), Georgia Hilburn (Shreveport, La.), Michael Lester (Collinsville, Okla.), Eddie Liechti (Tulsa), Jack Oxley (Flower Mound, Texas), Sheharyar Malik (Broken Arrow, Okla.), Carolina Port (St. Louis, Mo.) and Bethany Wilson (New York). 

Original source can be found here